[Geany-Devel] Proposal from the Mint distro

[Frank Lanitz]

Am 2012-10-18 09:17, schrieb Thomas Martitz:
> First of all, I find the idea of Geany becoming the default text
> editor in some distro. The idea that a distro uses an IDE as a text
> editor by default is an acknowledgement for our goal to keep Geany
> lightweight.
>
> I understand they want a simplified user interface. However, as Geany
> would be exposed to many newcomers, it should be clearly visible that
> this is not the real Geany (which is vastly more powerful). So IMO 
> the
> name should express the difference (perhaps "Geany Lite"?). Otherwise
> the newcomers will think of Geany as a simple text editor, and not a
> powerful IDE and ultimately use another program for IDE tasks.

Just thinking about running it with a configuration flag, maybe also 
switchable
inside Geany itself. Something like e.g. hide all sidebars which is 
already
available as e.g. keybinding. So you could call something like geany 
--minimal
and on running Geany you're ablt turn it to normal with a shortcut or 
something
like that. Geany --minimal could also be just kind of a link to a 
minimal
configuration file. Putting kind of a banner in top of Geany showing 
user he
is only using a subset of features.

> However, in the end it would be best and most important to avoid a
> fork, since that doesn't help us a bit.

ACK.

> PS: I'm also not sure that a new wave of contribution will come from
> the Linux Mint side, seeing that they consider to fork gedit rather
> than to improve it collectively with upstream (but perhaps they just
> became hesitant to work with Gnome people?). He even suggested 
> forking
> Geany in his very first approach to us.

They are used to "need to forking stuff" as you can see from cinnamon 
and
mate desktops. And its a valid option to be honest -- even I dislike it 
;)

Cheers,
Frank